Field
The present invention relates to the technical field of web interface management and, in particular, relates to a method and system for efficiently managing navigation categories in a distributed web environment.
Related Art
With the rapid development of the Internet, contents of a web environment, such as an e-commerce website, are becoming richer. To facilitate quick access to the contents the users are interested in, such websites can provide a hierarchical category navigation system. Based on this system, users can quickly find the contents that they are interested in. However, the category navigation system needs to be maintained and managed. Typically, in response to the change of requirements, the navigation categories in the system are adaptively updated. For example, in an e-commerce website, the search requirements of users may change due to the change of seasons and holidays. As a result, the navigation categories are updated adaptively to match the buyer's search requirements for commodities.
With the increase of network traffic, increasing numbers of web environments are establishing local sites for load distribution. In a multi-site web environment, the users of different sites typically vary. To meet the search requirements of different users of different sites, each site maintains and employs its own set of category navigation system. When a navigation category needs to be updated, the category maintenance personnel of each site manually update their navigation category. Such manual updates can be tedious, time consuming, and error-prone. Hence, the efficiency of this approach is relatively low.
While a category navigation system brings many desirable features to a web environment, some issues remain unsolved in the management of navigation categories in a multi-site web environment.